I attended the recent Salesforce.com Users conference last week which is now aptly called Dreamforce. Aptly because the overwhelming theme this year, was the ‘Cloud’ and I suppose most dreaming takes place in the clouds.
It’s a gathering that attracts almost 10,000 which is held in San Francisco. This is my second trip there, but the first as an attendee, and in particular for their Partner Summit. The perspective as an attendee is certainly a different one for me, running from one session to another, makes exhibiting actually seem like a breeze.
Salesforce.com marketers rank among some of the best in B2B marketing, and the best practices sessions were very good. These marketers know how to run campaigns, and measure everything. Email marketing is assumed, and marketing automation like ActiveConversion is quickly being adopted. Aggressive doesn’t even describe the kind of energy that the marketers here exude. You wouldn’t want to be marketing against these guys, unless you’re a Salesforce.com marketer as well.
With over 220+ booths, and a packed schedule, it was hard just to get 2 hours in to do the expo justice, as aisle after aisle of Salesforce.com AppExhange partners hustled their SaaS offerings. AppExchange partners integrate their offering with Salesforce.com to produce marketing automation solutions, hosting, integrated email, data cleansing etc. You name it, and it was probably here. Award for the newest innovation at the expo from me goes to Zuora, which is a billing platform for Appexchange partners.
Force.com, which is their platform for creating applications in the cloud, is still a primary focus. I was at the introduction last year, but now I’ve seen and met people actually on it. It has traction, if for no other reason than Microsoft, IBM, Google or anyone else really has a platform for Cloud Computing. Microsoft has announced, but without a credible presence in SaaS, they will need to do some catching up.
There didn’t seem to be much Canadian representation at the expo, except for the CRMfusion guys from Toronto who do a great job of data cleansing with their product. I did meet a number of Canadians that were attendees. Ian Hayes of Breakeven Solutions was particularly noteworthy, as he runs a company that helps non-profits (exclusively) use Salesforce.com effectively. A great idea, and in a way, a great cause.
There were 3 keynote speeches, each taking 2 hours by Marc Benioff (Salesforce CEO), Michael Dell and Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point). And the ‘Global Gala’ featured the Foo Fighters for 2 hours of classic rock. An absolutely packed agenda.
A lot to Dream in 2.5 days. But if you ever get the chance, and particularly if you're a Salesforce.com user, it’s well worth going.
ActiveConversion is the technology leader in total marketing measurement (TMM) and demand generation for SMBs. We help companies manage marketing... [more]
Salesforce.com is the worldwide leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) services. More companies trust their vital customer and... [more]
I attended the recent awards reception for the 2008 Tech Company Fast 50 and Tech Green 15 in Calgary. My company, ActiveConversion, was a nominee in the Company-to-Watch category, which scored me an invite to this event, which was attended by approximately 60 people. Deloitee's Jim Barker and Keith Mclean hosted this event for us at Teatro.
I'm happy to report, that 4 companies made this list for the Fast 50 and 4 companies made the list for the Green 15 in the prairies. The Fast 50 awards are based on highest percentage revenue growth over 5 years, whereas the Green 15 'recognizes Canada's leading GreenTech companies'.
The 4 Fast 50 companies located in Alberta and Saskatchewan are (growth in brackets):
These companies represent some of the best that Canada has to offer in high growth commercialized technology. Companies such as Research in Motion (Blackberry) started on this list, along with many well known Canadian tech success stories.
A quick review of these companies indicate that they are 100% software companies, which is well above the average 53% of the Fast 50 list.
Only 2 years old, the Green 15 award was won by 4 companies from Calgary. No doubt this is infuriating to David Suzuki having Calgary garner over 25% of this awards which recognizes technology that promotes a more efficient use and re-use of the earth's resources in industrial production and consumption. Nevertheless, the winners were:
Our limited population doesn't stop us from innovating with the best in Canada. And certainly the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well on the prairies to produce leading edge, revenue producing technology.
You can click on the above mentioned companies to find out more about them. The are all solid companies with great technology, management and people. Congratulations to all!
p.s. A special shout-out to Solium Capital from me, an early customer for ActiveConversion. We hope that 'AC' helped Solium along!
Solium Capital Inc. (TSX:SUM) is a leading global provider of web-based stock plan administration technology and services. Solium's integrated... [more]
IDC (Imaging Dynamics Company Ltd.) is a medical technology company and innovative driving-force in the fast-growing field of digital radiography... [more]
Monique Trottier is a Techvibes Guest Contributor.
When it comes to Harry Potter, the big question among the media is whether Pottermania is dead. Among booksellers and publishers, the question is who will be the next JK Rowling? And will there be another series as popular as Harry Potter?
As the former internet marketing manager at Raincoast Books, the Canadian publisher of the Harry Potter series, and as a book reviewer at SoMisguided.com, I’m interested in the answer to those questions. In fact, they were two questions posed to me at Portus 2008 in Dallas, TX .
Sponsored by the Harry Potter Education Fanon, Portus 2008 (July 10-13) was the fifth gathering of Harry Potter scholars, students and fans. Over 700 people were in attendance, which answers the first question. Is Pottermania dead? No.
Will there be another Harry Potter is a much harder question, but the answer can be found online by examining the phenomenon of Harry Potter in relation to the factors at play regarding social media and participatory culture.
What made Harry Potter unique was that the publication of the series spanned a 10-year period (1997-2007) that paralleled an explosion in broadband adoption and the introduction of powerful social media tools and websites:
The online tools made available during that 10-year publication period enhanced the power of the fans. It meant that fans around the globe could connect and interact in ways not previously available. Those tools also meant that author J.K. Rowling, her publishers, and the webmasters of fan sites could extend the message of Harry Potter beyond the confines of their own websites. They could generate buzz throughout social networks and the blogosphere. Across the world wide web. They could play off the energy of each other.
Blogging and content management tools allowed fans to easily create websites. Mugglenet.com, one of the best (and first) Harry Potter sites, was launched in 1999 by then-12-year-old Emerson Spartz.
MySpace.com and LiveJournal were two sites that played a huge role in terms of virtual communities and giving fans easy ways to stay in touch.
The launch of Wikipedia got fans thinking about creating databases of information. The Harry Potter Lexicon was launched in 2000.
MP3s, iTunes and YouTube.com resulted in over 200 different Harry Potter podcast programs and over 400 different Wizard Rock bands.
Is Pottermania dead? Will there be another Harry Potter?
There are less Harry Potter podcasts in 2008 than in 2007 or 2006, but there are more than 1 billion “Harry Potter” webpages, 3 movies still to come, the opening of Universal’s The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park, and fan conferences planned well into 2010.
Again, Pottermania may have died down, but it’s not dead.
And, will there be another Harry Potter? Only if all the factors are in place.
An entire generation of young people learned to read, write and engage with the world through the lens of Harry Potter and the fandom. Participatory culture is what they have always known. It’s certainly possible that the world may see another Harry Potter. It’s also possible that it will be written collaboratively and that our notions of mass culture, copyright and publishing will be completely transformed.
Many believe the success of a hyperlocal website is dependant on tapping into peer participation. At Techvibes, we agree which is why we're still on the look out for new blog contributors that can help us spread our hyperlocal model across North America. Unfortunately not everyone that expresses interest has the ability to commit to a regular schedule.
Enter Techvibes Guest Contributors. In order to take advantage of industry veterans and subject matter experts that have expressed interest in writing for Techvibes, we're inviting guest contributors to write one-off posts. If you're interested in guest blogging for Techvibes, send me a email telling me a bit about yourself and what you'd like to write about.
To date, Rebecca Bollwitt (Miss604), Chris Breikss, Dan Gibbons, Erik Lagerway, Basil Peters, and Rajan Sodhi have stepped up - are you next?
Chris Breikss is a Techvibes Guest Contributor.
Within the past week, Google launched a new tool called Google Trends For Websites, that helps measure web site popularity, site traffic, and site demographics. Yesterday, they launched a new tool that allows advertisers to target those Web sites via an online media buying planning tool called Google Ad Planner. Both are free tools, but Google Ad Planner is still in beta and you must complete a brief application using your Google account. Arthur Freydin claims on his blog that he received approval in under 12 hours but what is often true, is that if you can show a significant spend in your Google Adwords account, you will be accepted swiftly.
Search Guru Danny Sullivan is giving the tools solid reviews while challenging some of Google's secrecy on how it collects web site and user data. I expect that data is being pulled from Google Toolbar usage, Google Analytics Data Sharing and the related benchmarking feature, as well as tracking users when they are logged into their Gmail, Google Webmaster Tools, or other Google accounts.
As a partner in a marketing agency, I am excited about these new tools and the fact that they are helping shape and revolutionize the online media buying industry, one of the fastest growing industries in business.
Daniel Gibbons is a Techvibes Guest Contributor.
My son is now an "entrepreneur." That's what you're called when you don't have a job.
- Ted Turner
I was irritated recently by discussion in the blogosphere about Plurk, last month's newest entrant into the micro-blogging arena. Essentially it's like Twitter but with a visual time-line. Perhaps there's more to it, but I couldn't be bothered to invest the time to find out, and as I've done with so many other lightweight web-based applications I signed up and haven't been back since.
But what really annoyed me was the ridiculous bravado being expressed by bloggers who proudly announced themselves to be early adopters simply because they had signed up for a personal application for free while sitting in front of their macbooks in their pajamas.
For me, real early adopters are those who invest in new technology when there's risk involved. That doesn't necessarily mean they have to spend money, but it does mean they have to insert new technology into a context in which it could bring dramatic productivity or efficiency benefits. The flip side of that coin being that this new technology could equally well not bring those benefits and cause said early adopter to royally screw up and get fired. In other words, to be a real early adopter you have to be displacing something that actually has an established and meaningful place in your home or office, something that has dependencies.
All of this grouchiness got me thinking... It seems that there is a plague of infantilism spreading through the early stage technology community, in which tools and services are developed that add no meaningful value, choosing instead to grab 15 seconds of Internet fame and seduce the blogosphere. Most of us who've dabbled in web 2.0 applications are guilty of drinking the kool-aid cocktail of two parts viral adoption mixed with one part give it away for free and make it up on volume. And worse still, unlike the real success stories (Flickr, YouTube, StumbleUpon, even Twitter), it's as though we're trying to game the system. We convince ourselves that what we're doing is revolutionary and game-changing, when in fact it's mostly quite spectacularly ordinary. This is the cult of the entrepreneur at its worst, where somehow being an entrepreneur has become detached from the need to create real businesses that produce real things for real customers.
My last start-up, Lypp, went through three reinventions, the first two of which were about chasing the web 2.0 bubble without the discipline to ask tough questions about whether anyone in the real world would find utility or value in our creations. It's seductive at first -- surprising how easy it is to get into those storied offices on and around Sand Hill Road -- but in the end largely fruitless. Had we persisted I'm sure we could have raised the A round and perhaps jumped that large chasm in between the potential for something great and greatness actually materializing. In the end we settled for a much more mundane and pragmatic route, using our technology to deliver a conference call service and a platform for developing VoIP applications to an under-serviced Canadian market, and thereby creating a business that can run and grow profitably on auto-pilot. This time next year it will be what's dismissively referred to as a "lifestyle business", which certainly isn't what a VC would want, but just fine for me nonetheless.
So what's my point here? Well it might seem that I'm suggesting we all aim low rather than swing for the proverbial home run. But really I'm saying that the mentality of swinging for fences without doing the hard grind of creating something transformative first is utterly futile. As Marc Andreessen is fond of saying, it's absolutely always the market that draws the line in the sand between success and failure in business, which in turn means that simply cheerleading yourself won't produce any meaningful results.
In a recent presentation by a well-respected Canadian VC, he urged the audience to come into his office and bang their fists on the table, shouting claims of being the next Google. But much like American Idol, where most contestants are unable to distinguish between desperately wanting to have talent and actually having it, I'm sure that many aspiring entrepreneurs believe it's all about wanting success, rather than innovating to achieve it. Try and be the next Google if you like, but remember that Larry and Sergey were working away long before the first bubble burst, and they were applying fantastically innovative engineering to a problem many (most even) dismissed as irrelevant.
So perhaps in the end that's the message: we're our own worst enemies because we confuse validation from our peers in the tech community with the harder truths the market more subtly relays to us. In fact, chances are if the praise from your peers and the pajama/macbook crowd is louder than everything else it's time to look for a real job.
Basil Peters is a Techvibes Guest Contributor. All of a sudden, it seems like angel investing - and startups - are exploding in Vancouver. I remember going to the first Vantec and Vancouver Angel Forum meetings in the late 1990’s, and I’ve been to most of them since. The number of attendees, and number of presenting companies, has stayed pretty constant over the past decade. But in the last few months something seems to have changed. I received an email from Mike Volker, the founder of Vantec, yesterday. I was expecting his regular monthly meeting announcement, but was surprised to read that instead of the regular 3 or 4 presenting companies, there would be 15. So many startups want to present that Mike decided to let them pitch twice, once at the regular time in the morning of July 8 (from 8 to 11 AM) and once the afternoon before (July 7 from 2 to 5 PM). He is running the meeting twice so there will be enough seats for all the angels he expects to attend. Instead of our regular 90 minute meeting, it’s now almost a half day. And this is for the meeting in July – when you’d expect attendance to have started to drop off for the summer. The last Vancouver Angel Forum meeting was also the largest I can remember. I’ve been presenting one of the seminars for New Ventures BC for several years and this year the attendance of aspiring entrepreneurs was about double what it had been in any previous year. This dramatic increase in startup and angel activity is a fascinating development at a time when VCs in Canada very rarely fund startups and when most VCs are having trouble raising new money for their funds. If you are an angel investor, or accredited investor interested in angel investing, this is the link to Vantec where you can get more information on the July 7 & 8 meetings. I’ve also started a new group on Facebook called Angel Investors in Vancouver. Its open to anyone and I encourage you to join
Angelblog propagates best practices for entrepreneurs and angel investors. [more]
Basil Peters is a Techvibes Guest Contributor.
Over 90% of successful tech companies are financed in pretty much the same way:
The Friends and Family financings are always the easiest to complete - often taking less than two months from start to finish. Friends and Family rounds usually raise $25,000 to $150,000 in total – the amount depends a lot on who your friends and family are.
The only problem is that most people who invest in Friends and Family financings probably shouldn’t.
Even worse, well meaning but inexperienced, entrepreneurs often treat their friends and family investors unfairly, and cause considerable damage to their startup and future funding opportunities.
The entrepreneurs don’t do this intentionally - it’s most often just a by-product of entrepreneurial enthusiasm.
The most common way entrepreneurs get into trouble and end up treating their friends and family unfairly is by over-valuation. This causes serious structural problems that must be rectified before the next round of financing. Some of the ways to avoid this common mistake, and to fix it if necessary, are described at this link on startup funding valuation.
All financings and share sales are governed by securities legislation. Entrepreneurs must know what the legal requirements are before accepting that first dollar of investment, even if it's from a family member. An outline of startup funding legal requirements is available here.
More information on startup funding can be found on AngelBlog.
